Neil deMause: The Website

I revisit some of the small business operators who were threatened by downtown Brooklyn redevelopment last year, and find that many have now been forced out entirely:

Jeff Gargiulo’s e-mail address still says “BagelGuys,” but he’s no longer a bagel guy. Not since the day last year that he got an unexpected eviction notice from his landlord, who said his nine-year-old store on Willoughby Street in downtown Brooklyn was slated to be demolished to make way for a condo tower.

Thousands of Gargiulo’s customers signed petitions, but all it got him was a three-month stay of execution, after which he sold his equipment — at “10 cents on the dollar,” he says — and is now unemployed… [read more]

A look at the burning issue of the day, if you’re a Yankee fan without a taste for ballpark prices: Will the team try to level a ban on bringing in outside food when they move to their new city-financed stadium next year?

It says something about how the Yankees’ season is going that the biggest excitement at the stadium came when the team tried to ban fans from bringing sunscreen through the gates. Anyone who complained was pointed to the concession stands, which offered tiny one-ounce tubes for a whopping $5.

The club ultimately backed off, but the kerfuffle could foreshadow a bigger battle to come… [read more]

Just like last year, Astroland is again weeks away from the end of its season with no lease in place for next summer. Dire headlines to the contrary, though, the fabled Coney Island amusement park may be more likely to stay put than it appeared in the spring:

The headline in today’s amNewYork is grim: Astroland owner Carol Hill Albert says she’s preparing for the 46-year-old Coney Island theme park to close for good next month unless she gets a one-year lease extension from landlord Thor Equities within the next week. Asked by the paper if she was resigned to closing, Albert said, “I kind of am. I’m getting there.”

Before anyone panics in fear of having to go cold turkey on their skeeball jones, remember that this is the same thing Albert said all last summer, when she repeatedly put her rides up for sale, then pulled them off again in hopes of striking a deal with Thor. In fact, the real news here is that Albert says she’ll now settle for a one-year lease extension… [read more]

Because you can’t have too much of a good thing, I report for the Village Voice today on New York’s experiment with shutting Manhattan streets to traffic:

After trial runs in the hinterlands of Brooklyn’s Bedford Avenue and Montague Street, the NYC Summer Streets program landed in Manhattan for the first of three consecutive Saturdays this weekend. The big question: Would taking a contiguous strip of avenues from the Brooklyn Bridge to Central Park and shutting it to cars (driven or parked) draw more than the trickle of folks who attended the earlier experiments?

The answer: Hell yeah. Helped along by a crisp, breezy morning that felt more mid-May than mid-August, Lafayette Street, Fourth Avenue, and Park Avenue were thronged with bicyclists, joggers, more bicyclists, stroller-pushing pedestrians, and still more bicyclists… [read more]

When the New York City Department of Education announced last fall that it would start admitting schoolkids to gifted and talented classes solely on the basis of standardized tests, it said the new system would be fairer to all. Initial reports show it isn’t exactly working out that way:

Brooklyn mom Natalie Barratt had a bad feeling when her four-year-old son Luke Serrano emerged from his February testing session for admittance to the city schools’ gifted and talented programs. “The teacher who had administered the test wasn’t clear if he’d finished the test,” she recalls. After weeks of phone calls with the Department of Education, she had Luke retested. His score this time: an 89, one point too low for acceptance into a G&T kindergarten class. For want of a single correct answer, Luke was officially non-gifted.

In past years, this would have been just one setback in the tangled swirl of bureaucracy and arm-twisting that is commonplace in navigating the city’s Department of Education. This year, however, is different… [read more]

What do ocean trawling and mass transit have in common? unintended consequences.

There’s a word for it in the fishing world: “bycatch.” That’s the unfortunate tendency, when you’re trying to net one type of seafood — say, shrimp — to end up hauling in a lot of stuff you didn’t want or need — crabs, tuna, sea turtles, a Cousteau to be named later. It’s why eating wild-caught shrimp is considered the ecological equivalent of driving your SUV across the Alaskan tundra with the air conditioning on.

It’s also useful for understanding what the MTA faces in figuring how to raise bus and subway fares by 8 percent next year, to make up for the crash in tax revenues resulting from the popping of the real estate bubble… [read more]

There’s nothing more exciting than a new formula for calculating the poverty rate! Or at least so says New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who last week became the latest to put forth his own ideas (okay, actually those of Mark Levitan, a longtime NYC policy analyst) for revamping the poverty line. And there’s even a chance it’ll end up making a difference in policy towards the poor. Kinda. Maybe.

The new poverty measure unveiled by city officials at the recent NAACP convention presents New York City with a yardstick not just to count the city’s poor, but also to gauge the effect of anti-poverty measures and gain new perspective on New York’s residents – including the realization that poverty among the elderly and the employed is significantly worse than previously recognized.

The question now, say both city officials and poverty experts, is how the new statistic will be incorporated into city policies… [read more]

More on the great Brooklyn supermarket showdown, this time with more thoughts on what the conflict means for hopes of a livable city:

The scene on Fort Greene’s Myrtle Avenue on Thursday was certainly bursting with cheap irony: John Catsimatidis, the billionaire supermarket czar and likely 2009 mayoral candidate, being protested by local residents for taking away their only neighborhood supermarket. Catsimatidis, you see, is also a developer, and had torn down a strip of stores including an Associated (no relation to Catsimatidis’ Gristede’s chain) to make way for condo towers. Two years later, the site is still an empty lot; to add insult to injury, the demonstrators charged, the builder is now backing away from promises that the new buildings would include affordable housing.

If you live in one of the city’s supermarket-enriched zones, this might seem amusing — crying over Penn Station or Yankee Stadium is one thing, but an Associated?… [read more]

I report from downtown Brooklyn on the supermarket king who tore down a neighborhood’s only supermarket to make way for luxury condos. (Also: pictures of cute kids!)

It’s undoubtedly not how John Catsimatidis, the billionaire Gristede’s owner and rumored 2009 mayoral candidate, would have liked his bespectacled, slightly pudgy face get public recognition: aloft on a pole held by a Brooklyn pre-teen, beneath the words “SHAME ON YOU!!”

The occasion was a protest by Families United for Racial and Economic Equality (FUREE), the Brooklyn-based low-income group, over a much-delayed development project that Catsimatidis has in the works on Myrtle Avenue in Fort Greene… [read more]

In part two of my debunking of overinflated economic impact studies, I examine the claims that New York City will see an influx of tourist spending as a result of the “Waterfalls” public art exhibit:

I was riding the B train across the Manhattan Bridge recently when an especially civic-minded conductor thought to point out Olafur Eliasson’s “Waterfalls” art installations visible out either window. One passenger near me got up to take a peek, then sat back down, shaking her head: “It looks like the Brooklyn Bridge sprung a leak.”

That seems the popular verdict on the $15 million project (mostly funded by private donations, though the joint city-state-run Lower Manhattan Development Corporation kicked in $2 million): This is a waterfall?… [read more]